The Daemon in the Machine

by Felicity Savage

  Why is that what I want? Not the other—brutal, impersonal usage, buggery as a substitute for “the real thing”—which I might possibly get?

  But he knew.

  Whenever it’s more than just physical, Yozi, you get as romantic as a schoolgirl. You’ve got to stop falling for normal men.

  And the truth underlying that flippant self-admonition was too deep to think about: that he had never fallen for anyone, normal or crooked, like this.

  The shadow...

  When he opened his eyes—he might have slept, or dozed, he didn’t know—he heard the Blacheim’s engine turning over.

  I’ll never be an angel

  I’ll never be a saint, it’s true...

  I been up and down and all around

  It’s all about survival

  —Ciccone / Austin

  This Life So Free

  10 Maia 1896 A.D. Kirekune: the Ochadou Plains

  Again they took to the air, and flew southwest. Uemiel could only muster a third of Elektheris’s speed, so it was a strange, stately journey, the antique bomber chugging through expanses of star-filled night without a glimmer of human habitation below. Mickey slept most of the time they were in the air. Occasionally he woke and peered down at the vast dark platter of the earth. Then he would look at the instruments, which always said exactly what they were supposed to; and then the stars would overcome him and send him wheeling back into oblivion.

  It was supposed to be his task to keep watch on the ground, during the days, while Crispin slept. But the Blacheim’s thermometer registered 97°F every afternoon, and what with the sweet smell of the ripening seed heads, and the hum of insects, and the starry flashing of their wings over the grass, he always ended up falling asleep, too. Crispin never said a word (except in his dreams, when he cursed and argued loudly; Mickey had got used to this, and usually managed to tune him out). When night fell, one of them roused the other, and they flew on. From the Raw Marches to Okimako, at this latitude, it was about two hundred leagues as the crow flew, or four and a half hundred miles by the Ferupian measure. At Uemiel’s speed they were making barely eighty miles a day. Mickey only hoped they were going in the right direction. At Air Base XXI and indeed all over the Raw, no one ranked lower than marshal or general had been allowed to own maps—of Kirekune or anywhere else.

  It hadn’t escaped him that Crispin was clocking too many flight hours. Every day he looked older. The lines under his eyes and around his mouth were chiseled as deeply as if they’d always been there. Each evening, as their next stint in the Blacheim drew near, he would retire into himself, ceasing to speak. But Mickey reasoned that if he needed to stop and rest, he would say so. No one was waiting for them in Okimako. There was no need to press ahead so fast. Therefore, Crispin must be perfectly comfortable with the number of hours he was spending at the whipcord.

  He knew this wasn’t true. Crispin was a stubborn son of a bitch, ferociously self-critical, who held himself to unrealistic standards. Besides, he was the ranking pilot of the two of them—and a captain never, ever let a regular see him falter. Mickey knew that Crispin still held himself responsible for both of them, and would probably rather kill them both by falling asleep in the air than ask to be spelled, when he knew that if Mickey were to try to use his right arm before the muscles and tendons healed, he would damage it beyond repair.

  That was another reason Mickey said nothing. He couldn’t even move the stiffened arm. It ached constantly, and he hadn’t let Crispin see the jaundiced flesh with the red threads leading away from the sealed gashes. He was afraid infection had set in.

  Yet in one way he was grateful for the low-grade fever that rendered sleep easy and comatose, as he was grateful for the constant, niggling ache in his arm. It prevented him from dreaming or even thinking too much about Okimako. The city had receded from an immediate threat into a hazy, almost unreal future.

  Four nights after the incident in the Chadou village, Crispin put the Blacheim down in a water meadow carpeted with bright verdure, cupped in an oxbow of one of the rivers that meandered across the vastness. The meadow was a half mile wide and slightly sunken below the level of the plains. The ankle-short grass was very different from the tough, tall plainsgrass that sucked all the goodness out of the soil and spread like the wind, rendering farming impossible wherever the climate was suited to its growth. The reason it had not spread down here, Mickey guessed, was because when it rained, the bowl would flood. Certainly, stooping to rub the juicy grass in his fingers, he could see no molehills, no loper droppings, nothing except the tiny, near-invincible daisies whose roots spread like a labyrinth underground.

  Trees grew up the banks of the meadow: willow and hazel in full foliage. A flood plain for certain. But the sky had been clear since the storm in the Raw Marches. It would probably be all right. He turned, shading his eyes against the sun, and shouted, “Nice place we’ve got here!”

  Crispin jumped down from the cockpit. He landed neatly, started to call out a cheerful reply, then broke off as he staggered to his knees. For a minute, Mickey thought he had stumbled into some sort of quicksand, and he hesitated before rushing to him. Crispin’s eyes were closed, his mouth open. His pulse beat wearily, raggedly, like an old engine turning over.

  He had fainted. That was all. He had fainted.

  The sun flooded down on Mickey as he dragged Crispin into the shadow of the Blacheim’s wing. A fresh breeze blew off the river, into the shade. His heart was bursting with fear, but he could do nothing except wait for Crispin to recover consciousness. At least the first thing he sees will be a friendly face.

  After about fifteen minutes, Crispin opened his eyes, frowned as if he didn’t like what he saw, and closed them again. Mickey shook him. “Are you all right!”

  “Shurrup f’ Queen’s sake.” Crispin’s brow furrowed and he turned his face into Mickey’s chest like a huge child trying to go back to sleep.

  “What the hell happened?”

  Crispin spoke into Mickey’s tunic. His voice was perfectly normal yet somehow Mickey had a feeling that he was not really conscious but speaking out of a dream, into a dream in which Mickey was a character, not himself. “I’m hallucinating... marginally insane... losing my touch... having a nervous breakdown... any number of things. Dunno what to call it. You wouldn’t either.”

  “I might if you told me.” Mickey shifted Crispin’s head into the crook of his left arm—he really was amazingly light—and reached across with his other hand to adjust Crispin’s rucked-up uniform jacket. Crispin wrinkled his nose as Mickey’s sleeve brushed across his face.

  “Pfuh!” His eyes flew open and he sat up. He was properly conscious now. The difference was outstanding. “You’ve opened it up again! You went fucking dragging me around the place, didn’t you! How much of an idiot are you?”

  “Yeah, yeah.” Mickey concealed his arm behind his back.

  “It’s infected! Lemme see.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “She... I... I have a sense of smell, all right? If it’s infected, you’re going to lose it unless you do something about it.”

  “Look, you’re the one who just passed out. Don’t worry about me!” It was so ridiculous Mickey had to laugh. The wounds probably had reopened while he dragged Crispin out of the sun. But he hadn’t even noticed, or felt the pain get any worse, until Crispin drew his attention to it.

  “Let me see.” Crispin’s eyes glittered as if he too had a fever.

  Maia-June 1896 A.D.

  Kirekune: the Ochadou Plains

  They stayed for a month on the miniature floodplain, both of them slowly recuperating. There was water; there was sun; there were mosquitoes; and as the month wore on, there were red currants and other berries on the banks below the trees.

  It was one of the happiest times Mickey could remember having passed in his life. Not even the constant pain in his arm—which seemed, against all reason, to be getting worse, not better, until he had to carry it by his sid
e like a wooden limb—could lessen his heart’s delight. He wondered if Crispin were enjoying himself, too. Sometimes he thought maybe; but then he would remember that Crispin had something else on his mind, something that couldn’t be eased by the simple panaceas of sleep and sun and wormy raspberries. Crispin knew he was having nightmares, and he was afraid of them. Had it been anyone else, Mickey would have teased him about it, but the way Crispin cried in his sleep warned him not to bring up the subject.

  After they had argued each other into agreeing that it wasn’t practical to move on immediately, Crispin had slapped at a mosquito and remarked: “We’ll be lucky if we don’t catch malaria off these bloodsuckers, that’s all I have to say,” and over the course of four weeks, he remained uncommunicative and distrustful, of the water, the ground, the day, the night—distrustful, it seemed, even of the air itself. It took Mickey longer than it should have to realize that, of course, what Crispin really distrusted was Kirekune in its entirety.

  Did Mickey himself fall into the category of highly suspect? No telling. They didn’t do a lot of talking. Not to each other, nor to the Kirekuni daemon curled like a maggot inside the Blacheim, growing fat and idle off their store of splinterons.

  Perhaps because he dreaded dreaming, Crispin was always reluctant to lie down to sleep. During the day he seemed indifferent to Mickey’s company; but after dark he would ask him to come sit with him on a large, flat stone a stride out from the riverbank, that seemed to have been dropped there from the sky, to teach him Kirekuni grammar, vocabulary, and idiom. Crispin was a better student, Mickey thought, than he himself was a teacher. He’d discovered that it was one thing to speak a language from the cradle and another to itemize it to someone else. But despite the frustrations involved, he didn’t suggest stopping the lessons. Firstly because of the tremendous, terrible reason he could no longer deny to himself, which wouldn’t let him pass up a chance at Crispin’s company; and secondly because his still-unhealed arm hurt too much now to allow him to sleep easily, either. Crispin plagued him about the injury, asking endless questions: how was it today, how did it feel when you woke up this morning, I wish you’d wear a sling, let me see it, dammit I don’t understand why you’re so secretive... but Mickey kept the pain to himself out of a superstitious conviction that not talking about it would make it go away. Besides—the longer it took to heal, the longer they would have to stay here...Yes, altogether better to keep Crispin in the dark for now.

  And anyhow, that was fair, wasn’t it, considering Crispin had not divulged a single word about the disability he appeared to have developed: his reasons for not having gone near the Blacheim in two weeks. That was just plain irresponsible behavior for a daemon handler. Mickey, at least, had an excuse.

  Tonight Crispin had made a point of not mentioning his arm. Instead he said out of nowhere, in correct Kirekuni: “Tell me about your family.”

  Mickey stared. They had been going over the vocatives used toward everyone from a Disciple down to a Dead City beggar; perhaps that was what had made Crispin think of it. But the sentence was perfectly grammatical. He must have rehearsed it beforehand. A half-full moon shone down on the river, turning the fishing pole resting on Crispin’s knee into a trembling rod of quicksilver. The only fish they’d ever caught here were spiny trout with too little flesh in between their bones and carapacelike scales to make them worth cooking; they picked them clean anyway because they had no other source of meat in their diet, unless one of them ventured up to the plain to trap lopers.

  “What about them?” Mickey said.

  “If you’re going to introduce me to them, it would help if I knew who was who.”

  Mickey felt a pang of disappointment. They’d been camping by the river since the moon was a fingernail-clipping crescent, and he’d started to entertain nebulous hopes that the charms of peace and quiet would derail Crispin’s determination to reach Okimako. He should have known better. Crispin’s feet had never really touched the ground. Even here he was hounded by past and future, dogged by his private whatever-it-was, always distracted, always planning ahead.

  “They’re not your sort,” he said meanly. “I don’t expect you’ll want to stay long with them.”

  He glanced involuntarily across the meadow at the dark shadow poised on the grass, moonlight gleaming on its windshield, the single botched stroke that spoiled the trompe l’oeil.

  “Not my sort? What’s my sort?”

  Mickey gestured with his good hand. “Military types.”

  “Uh-uh.”

  “Circus people.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Well, my family aren’t entertainers.” He could not keep a note of pride out of his voice. “My mother runs a brothel. A very professional establishment.”

  “That’s a kind of circus, isn’t it? Entertainment anyway. And entertainers are professionals. They have to be.”

  “I don’t know, it’s not entertainment where we’re concerned. I suppose the clients see it differently.”

  “Where we’re concerned?” Crispin said in surprise. “You don’t...”

  “Significant, no! The gay-girls take care of all that!” Mickey was stunned that Crispin could think such a thing even for a moment. What an alien place he must suppose Okimako, what a wide realm of possibilities it must encompass for him! “We’re the management. And the owners. We have our own wing—well, really, it’s the basement, but my mother’s been angling for years to buy half of the house next door. There’s a door at the top of the stairs. The Blue Door.” He shook his head, remembering. “When I was a kid, we weren’t allowed to go through after seven at night—one time, my big sister was looking through the keyhole, and this client bashed through, apparently his girl had made herself scarce when he got violent, he’d only paid the regular fee, we charge the earth for anything that could cause visible marks... the door hit Fumia and knocked her downstairs. She was lucky to only get one leg and a finger broken. After that we weren’t allowed even to go up the stairs on pain of death. And before you ask,” he added as Crispin started to interrupt, “not really death, just bed without supper.”

  “Listen, I’ve—”

  “We don’t slaughter our children for disobedience any more than we turn them into sex slaves.”

  “I’ve been in Okimako, all right? I know you people aren’t monsters.”

  “You’ve what?”

  There was a short, horrid pause.

  “—I mean I haven’t been there, of course not, I’ve heard about it; that’s—”

  “Then why’d you say you had?” It had been so definite a statement. As if Mickey should have known all about Crispin’s habit of spending his leaves in the new city, and for that matter about his relatives on Aspadder Street.

  “A slip of the tongue.”

  “No need to get worked up over it, then.”

  Crispin gathered in his fishing line and recast, ferociously. “I’m not getting worked up!”

  It had come as a shock to Mickey that he and Crispin scarcely ever agreed on anything. Of course, they never had, not on the superficial level to which the circumstances of the QAF confined pilots of differing rank; but he’d thought that if they ever really talked, things would be different...

  They were—worse. In the Raw, Crispin, aware of his audience even when there was none, had always been quick to find fault with Mickey. But now it was Mickey who couldn’t help starting arguments.

  He tried to placate Crispin. “Well, you’re right about one thing: we certainly do have some characters in our family.”

  Crispin was fishing angrily, if such a thing were possible, sitting with his back turned, his gigantic shoulders hunched.

  “The Akilas have owned the same premises for two hundred years. My grandparents made the business what it is today. My mother—Saia—was the second of their four children. My uncle Kit died young, and my aunt Saonna joined a cult. She was another extraordinary one. She took off when I was just a baby, with her husband. The other one left
is my uncle June. He collects hair.”

  “He...Whose?”

  Mickey smiled to himself. He had known that would get a response. “Anyone’s who’ll sell it to him. The gay-girls always want extensions, rats, knots... even my sisters do, sometimes, though none of them go in much for fashion. And since the gay-girls come and go, June likes to keep every possible length and color on hand. He has about two hundred shades. Mine is what they call Rusty Nails, in the hair business; I had to cut it off when I joined the Disciples, and I gave him my ponytail.” Ruefully Mickey ran the fingers of his good hand through his buzz cut, which had grown out into spikes. “As for the gay-girls, not all of them are Kirekuni. There’s usually an Izte Kchebuk’aran and a northerner or two—yellowfaces, westerners, aren’t much in demand, but we keep a couple for the cheaper clients. And we had a Ferupian once, a blonde, and another time a Lamaroon girl. They both got better offers, though.” Mickey paused. “I hope I’m not giving you the impression I was involved in running the business. I wasn’t, although we were all steeped in it to a degree, of course. I was at school until I was sixteen, before I joined up.”

  “Straight off?”

  “There were two years in between.” Mickey grimaced. “I think I probably came home about twice.”

  “Wild child, huh,” Crispin said. “What about your sisters? What are they like?”

  They re beautiful, Mickey thought, but a hateful instinct stopped him from saying it. “What about them? I have three. One older, two younger. Fumia’s the eldest—Significant, she’s probably married by now, she had enough suitors even before I left. Then there’s Ashika and Zouka. They’d be...” He had to add up the years on his fingers. It staggered him that he had never thought to do this. In his mind his sisters remained as he had last seen them: flushed, giggling hysterically, clutching their lace shawls with their tails, struggling to keep their composure as the roller coaster at the Kirili Fairgrounds whipped them up and down and from side to side. That had been his day of grace, traditionally given to recruits just before they set off on the long, arduous, most likely one-way journey to the front, not just out of the goodness of the Disciplinarians’ hearts but also as a test of the recruits’ honor and resolve. Everyone had stared as he squired them through the smelly, rackety, wonderful carnival that operated all year on the bank of the Orange. One skinny boy in uniform and three stunning, demure girls in the bloom of youth, their tail-tattoos and their quality clothes revealing that they were from better parts. The looks of envy, the taste of candy floss, of a sugar pear he had finished when Zouka did not want any more...that day was immortalized in his memory as twenty-two and a half hours of heaven.